It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It turned hot on Tuesday and Clarence got the Crosley electric window fan out from the basement. But it was cool in the basement, so he sat down for a while to catch up on some old magazines. 1958 was a hot year too. He brought the fan up and took the quilts down and read some more. Eisenhower: quite a man. And those tailfins. I don’t believe you ever see a car in that exact shade of green these days. And white sidewalls. Do they still exist?
Questions like those keep him awake at night: Audie Murphy, alive or dead? What happened to Mary Miller of the 42nd Street Gang on “Sunday in Manhattan”? What a great show that was. It’s hot and you kick off the blanket in your sleep and then you’re aroused by your indecency and wake up and cover yourself and think about Mary Miller for a while and go to sleep.
There was a thin high-pitched whine in the air from clouds of mosquitoes and gnats, but we’re used to that. It’s summer and this is Minnesota, and mosquitoes are part of our heritage, going back to the seventeenth century when French explorers searching for the fabled oilfields of the north, canoeing through swamps and streams on the sweltering muskeg, stopped and looked at each other covered with black insects and red welts and dizzy from slapping their heads and said, “What do (you) say (we) try Quebec first and leave this for later?” And so our fabled oilfields remain safe and secure. Mosquitoes are what don’t show up in the gorgeous color photographs of Minnesota, and we’re not supposed to complain, but you ought to admire us for living here, it’s an accomplishment, not everybody could do it.
Ella Anderson was in her garden digging up a patch of elderly irises, coated with mosquito lotion, Nuits de la Nord, which smells like ripe bananas. Father Emil was in the rectory garden putting in his onions—he has resigned as pastor of Our Lady and is only staying temporarily to help Father Wilmer get settled, but Sunday after Mass, Wilmer had his bags packed for two weeks of vacation. “How can you?” said Father. “You just started. I put in almost fifty years, I got to retire.” Wilmer said he had thirty-seven vacation days coming from the diocese. Father never heard about a vacation policy. “Oh yes,” Wilmer said, “and we got profit-sharing. IRAs for clergy. It’s new this year.” Father Emil thought, Next thing they’ll have a Frequent Prayer program with prizes, put an odometer on the Rosary. So Wilmer went to San Francisco. He said, “No mosquitoes there, you know.” Father Emil walked behind him out to the car, carrying Wilmer’s gym bag. “They got sharks,” he said, “they got snakes, they got mad dogs come down out of the hills on hot days and bite you in the hinder, you’ll be sick for a week.” Wilmer just laughed. No mosquitoes in California, and that’s a vacation for him. That’s why Father put in his onions. Green onions are a mosquito preventative. In forty-four years, he has yet to be bitten on the lips.
“It doesn’t seem right,” Myrtle said to Sister Arvonne, up in the Our Lady basement, planning the picnic for the Daughters of Martha in June, “that we have the God-given beauties of nature and can’t even enjoy them for the Goddamned mosquitoes, it doesn’t seem fair.” Myrtle is seventy-three and she has talked that way all her life. Her husband, Florian, you couldn’t get a swear word out of him if you squeezed him with a pair of pliers, but Myrtle has a gland in her neck next to the thyroid that secretes profanity, especially when mosquitoes get bad. She sits in her yellow lawn chair in the shade and slaps and swears, and now she’s talking about moving to a senior citizen high rise in Saint Cloud. “Mosquitoes don’t go higher than the third floor unless there’s an updraft. I read an article on it. You live above the sixth floor, you’re free and clear.”
She’s campaigned for the move to the high rise for almost two years, going back to when she got in a fight with her sister-in-law Beatrice over a blue Bavarian crystal vase Beatrice chose from Myrtle’s mother’s things after she died. Myrtle thought it was odd to let an in-law pick over Mother’s things but she didn’t want to say anything, and then Beatrice drew the short straw and reached out and picked the one precious thing out of the lot, the blue vase that to Myrtle had been since early childhood the most beautiful object she could imagine, left by a princess as a token of a gay life to come. Saturday, when the girls cleaned the worn-out little house, they shined up the crystal vase and walked around to see the diamonds that it made from a beam of light. It was magical. Fat Beatrice clutched it to her tremendous bosom and sighed for happiness, who knew nothing about this vase, hadn’t grown up with it, she could buy one in a dime store and it’d be the same to her—but Myrtle didn’t want to say anything, so she hauled off and slapped her across the face hard, and Beatrice squeezed the vase and it shattered and one shard pierced her left breast. She jumped up and tore off Myrtle’s wig and the other sisters fell in between them. They cried and picked up the broken glass. They said they were sure glad Mother wasn’t alive to see this, it woulda killed her. They made Beatrice and Myrtle kiss and make up. Myrtle gave Beatrice a peck on the cheek and whispered into Beatrice’s right ear, “Jesus goddamn you fat old bitch.” Six lowdown nasty words from the mouth of a grandma. There’s been a poisoned courtesy between them ever since, fourteen years of saying hello between thin hard lips, and two years ago, when Beatrice became president of Catholic Mothers, Myrtle wanted to leave town.
Myrtle’d like to live someplace exciting. Lake Wobegon is boring. She almost moved to Minneapolis in 1937. She was going to go and then she didn’t and she’s been talking about it ever since, how she came this close to going and if only she had, well, she wouldn’ta ever had to put up with this horseshit. Whenever her kids were rotten, she told them how she’d almost gone away in 1937 and wished she had. She’s been putting up with it for fifty years. She’s sick and tired of it.
To Florian, the idea of moving to Saint Cloud is unthinkable. Myrtle says, “I seen a article in the Times about a new high rise opening up. We oughta get our names in for that—you know some people have to wait two years on the waiting list before they get in, that’s how much people our age want to live in one, two years you got to wait. That’s how desirable they are. Two years.” Florian gets up to put toast in the toaster, make another cup of Sanka, stalling for time, wishing she’d forget it. “Well?” she says. “Well?”
“I just don’t think it’s realistic,” he says. Living in a tall building, seven, eight stories up: he went up the Foshay Tower once, thirty-one stories, and couldn’t stand near the edge because there was suction from the ground trying to pull him off. So if you lived on the eighth floor and couldn’t go near the windows and had to walk around next to the inside wall and maybe tie your left ankle to the bedpost at night, what kind of life would it be?
He’s lived there at the Krebsbach place since before he was born. His mother had him in the downstairs bedroom, presumably conceived of him there too and the six others before him, four of them dead now. The latest one, dear Ruth, his favorite sister, how funny and dear she was and yet her taste in men, my God! four husbands, the first of whom was a disaster and they went down from there. But as long as she lived and as bad as she felt, she could always come back home because Florian lived here. He rents out the land to Roger, but he still has the house and every Thanksgiving and Christmas and Memorial Day and Fourth of July there are some Krebsbachs there, depending on how they feel about each other that year.
“Give me one reason,” Myrtle says, “give me one good reason why we wouldn’t be better off in an apartment in Saint Cloud.”
That’s why, a few years ago, Florian started raising ducks. At first a dozen and now a flock of thirty-six.
“It’s good meat,” he said, “and you know, they do eat mosquitoes.”
“Ducks don’t eat mosquitoes, don’t be dumb.”
“Oh yes, they eat their weight in mosquitoes. I read that in an article.”
Myrtle looks at him. What is he talking about? She’s the one who reads the articles. She never read word one about ducks.
“If they eat mosquitoes, how come we got so many we can’t even sit in the backyard?”
“If they didn’t eat them, we’d have a lot more, we wouldn’t be able to sit, period.”
Since Myrtle started talking high rise, Florian has bought a number of old Farmall tractors at auction and a corn drill and an old combine. He talks about fixing them up. Since she started talking about how nice a three-room apartment would be, he’s been picking up old dressers cheap and antique bedsteads and washstands. As an investment. And expanding his duck herd.
So when she says to give her one reason, he says, “What can I do with the ducks?”
He takes a kitchen chair and sits in the yard and all the ducks come around. He holds up the cheese curls in one hand and caramel popcorn in the other and his audience looks up and he tells them a joke. He says: So one day a duck come in this bar and ordered a whiskey and a bump and the bartender was pretty surprised, he says, “You know we don’t get many of you ducks in here.” The duck says, “At these prices I’m not surprised.” And he tosses out the popcorn and they laugh. Wak wak wak wak wak.
I was shot in the leg in the war.
Have a scar?
No thanks I don’t smoke.
Senator K. Thorvaldson saw Father Emil planting onions behind the rectory, he walked over and said, “I thought you were retiring and moving South.”
“Well, I thought you were going to marry that woman out in Maine and move East.”
“Well, maybe I will, I don’t know. It’s hard to leave here though when I’m so curious to see what’s going to happen to you. I want to find out how the story ends before I go away.”
Father mentioned Myrtle and Florian. “Telling jokes to ducks!” says Senator K. “Has Florian lost his marbles or what, then?”
“He has forgotten an awful lot of jokes but the few he remembers the ducks enjoy them over and over.”
Florian sits out back and just about falls over, some of them are so good.
Hey, call me a taxi.
“Give me one reason,” she says, “why we shouldn’t pack up and leave this town.”
He says: So this couple went to get a divorce, she was eighty-nine and he was ninety-two—the judge said, “Why? You’ve been married seventy years and now you want a divorce?” “We hate each other,” she said. “We haven’t been able to stand each other since 1932.” “Why did you wait so long?” he said. “We wanted to wait until the children were dead. This woulda killed them.”